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Estonia, a small country hugging the Baltic Sea to the east, is seen by many as one of the world’s most digitised countries. Citizens cast their vote online and the country even has a provision for e-residency, and this and more has made the tiny nation something of a poster child for the use of technology in matters of public policy. India still has a fair way to go before the nation of 1.3 billion catches up with tiny Estonia but the journey has certainly begun in earnest.

This journey will acquire momentum in 2018. Here are a few of the shifts that will accelerate over the next year and change the way we work and play and interact with the Government and each other.
Government BlockchainWhile they may be passing through a bit of a lull these days, real estate prices had an extended bull run, triggered by liberalisation and the resultant spike in inflow of foreign money and the GDP growth rate. When there is a chance for money to be made, there is also a chance for illegal shenanigans. Right on cue, over the last few years multiple instances of tampering of land records have come up.

Adoption of Blockchain technology as the underlying way to digitise land records, among other things, can potentially help do away with such tampering, thereby protecting the integrity of record-keeping in the government. States like Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have already announced plans to digitise land records using Blockchain technology. Even the government in West Bengal, seen as a bit of a laggard when it comes to technology, is looking towards Blockchain to protect its documents.

For those who came in late, Blockchain is the real innovation underpinning crypto mania and is a system of distributed ledgers that permanently records and verifies transactions between two parties. It is hard to tamper with and is expected to become the standard in which all kinds of transactions will be stored in the future.

Digital addressesThe ongoing digitisation theme in governance doesn’t end with providing each individual resident in the country a unique identification number, but also extends to addresses. E-Locations or E-Loc is a system being piloted for the Department of Post by MapMyIndia and will geo-tag addresses and give them a unique ID. In an under-mapped country like India, finding the right address has been a problem that has vexed all of us. But this isn’t just about the confusion we go through while finding addresses. It has a direct financial bearing on many services which are delivered using addresses.

It is also an interesting example of how digitisation initiatives don’t need to come from the government and can be triggered by efforts from private players like MapMyIndia and Hyderabad-based Zippr. Aditya Vuchi, the founder and chief executive of Zippr, who has also been working on similar initiatives over the past few years, believes that it can be as transformative as Aadhaar.

Local language internet2018 could well be the year when India’s internet-enabled population breaches 500 million. But the real impact of such a large population having the interconnected world at their fingertips would come only when the internet and the services it offers are delivered in a language they can understand. Far too much of what can be found online in India is delivered in English, primarily because that’s the language of choice for the more affluent.

The onus of making this happen is equally on the industry as it is on the government. The fortune in the middle and the bottom of India’s internet pyramid can be unleashed by delivering more through local languages. With India’s internet population hovering around 300-400 million, any further expansion of the internet must take into account the language barrier. According to KPMG and Google, 75% of India’s internet user base would be Indian language users by 2021. All through 2018, there is likely to be launches of products tailored for this population from the internet’s big guns like Google and Facebook as well as services moved online by the government.

The Aadhaar interlinking This one has been controversial from the word go with the great interlinking debate on for a while now. The Supreme court will decide soon if the country would proceed in the direction of integrated databases, with Aadhaar at the centre of it, underpinning the delivery of services from banking to taxes to governance to subsidies to even your mobile phone.

This can be revolutionary and dangerous at the same time. Revolutionary, because it can truly change the way the common Indian interacts with the government and it does have the potential to make India a more efficient country. Dangerous, because in the hands of a government not committed to the privacy of its citizens, it can let data leak through such interlinking. Given the inadequate checks and balances, leaking data can be easily available to cyber criminals. Which way will it go? Over to the Supreme Court.

Malware everywhereThe dirtier side of digitisation is that India would become even more lucrative for the unsavoury elements on the internet. The advent of Reliance Jio has brought internet to many millions of people across India. The recent emphasis on digital payments has made them move into the digital transactions bandwagon. Unfortunately, this user growth has not been accompanied by user literacy. That primes them too be vulnerable to any number of attacks, starting with malware to phishing.

Many security researchers say that India has not been the target of major attacks thus far, primarily due to the low penetration of the internet. Also, it wouldn’t have made sense for the nefarious elements to target the country because of the high effort needed to extract low returns. That is slowly changing. With hundreds of millions coming online, the country is becoming a more attractive target. You can start to stay on top of such threats by installing all updates, not installing apps from unknown developers, not clicking on random links and not sharing sensitive details with anyone. Remember, it pays to be a cyber paranoid.

This article is part of a 14-story-series on disruptions that will change your life in 2018